


Of Whores and High-Born Beauties

by lemonbalmlemonverbena



Series: Nine gifts from the Old Gods [4]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-12
Updated: 2018-01-12
Packaged: 2019-03-03 20:09:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13348617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lemonbalmlemonverbena/pseuds/lemonbalmlemonverbena
Summary: This piece is meant to mostly pair with the Sandor POV piece, “The Baby Birds.” I'm probably doing Dinklage!Tyrion dirty here, so think of GRRM/book!Tyrion if it helps.





	Of Whores and High-Born Beauties

He’d known the bloody Hound longer than almost any other man living.

They were nearly the same age. 

They’d once been two very different but equally hideous beasts in a land of golden beauties like Jaime and Cersei. 

The Hound had been a character in the background of his life for as long as he could remember, first trailing and guarding Cersei in those fraught years when she loved Rhaegar and had seen him killed at the Trident, and then after she was married off to a lout who yearned only for a dead woman.

And then came the children: Joffrey, Myrcella, Tommen, and they had that in common too.

Joff should have been put in a bag and throw into the Blackwater as a baby, but no, he was the Usurper’s heir. Privilege and honor were draped upon him by all hands, all eyes looked upon him as though he were himself a golden treasure. But Tyrion and the Hound both shared the sickening knowledge that he was not merely a smug entitled little shit--though he was that--but a very dangerous boy prone to genuinely disturbing thoughts and acts.

The Hound and the Imp grew older alongside each other, pacing each other as bitter cynics in the land of lies, Clegane sharpening his sword, Lannister sharpening his mind, both equally dismayed by the naked ambition and will-to-power politics that seemed to be the guiding _emotion?_ \--yes, emotion--of House Lannister.

But above all, they had whores in common.

Because beautiful girls, high-born girls, wouldn’t touch them. Ever. 

Because if you were as ugly and misshapen as they were, any kind of respectable, kind, pleasant girl you wanted to like you, to lust after you, to love you, just...didn’t. Those girls wouldn’t even look men like Imp and the Hound in the eyes. Those girls were peeled off one by one and became the lovers and wives of other men, and bore their children, and disappeared into those other arms forever.

You could try to speak to them at a festival or in a hallway or at a market, and if they didn’t flee outright or look around desperately for rescue, you yourself could hardly choke back the sickening feeling that came over you as you groveled for their attention, the regret and shame for being so needy and yet never seeing anyone, ever, reciprocate your desire.

So they both patronized whores. Never together, exactly, but...

As young men, they certainly hadn’t visit the winesinks of Lannisport in each other’s company, because after all, Tyrion was a Lannister and the Hound was a...guard? But the Westerlands wasn’t such a big place and if you were a red-blooded young man in need of some release, there weren’t all that many options.

His favorite such establishment was called Favor’s, which was truly named for the proprietor, one Micah Favor, but the double entendre was entirely intentional. 

And maybe Favor’s was where his heavy drinking had begun in earnest, because you truly cannot visit a whorehouse sober. It’s the most tragic place in the world if you can see it clearly.

Even the prettiest girls are tired in a way that most people cannot imagine because it comes not from lack of sleep but lack of hope. Missing teeth, blackened teeth, flea bites, sores, stringy hair falling out in clumps--he’d seen all manner of womanhood rot in a whorehouse, girls who just suffered in their decay until pieces of them fell right off.

Half of them did what they did so that they might feed a bastard already born. Others lived for milk of the poppy. Some were just poor and stupid and ugly and had no other hope for survival other than selling their cunts to any cock with a coin.

So you went, and you drank until you couldn’t see, and then a woman came and said what you want to hear and sucked your dick and then afterward you listened to the sound of your own lonely heart beating, because there was still no one there. Not really. 

He remembered arriving at Favor’s one night to find the front door lacked a top hinge. “The Mountain and the Hound had a bruiser last night. Shoulda known not to let in the one while the other was already here.”

He always wondered which whores the huge Clegane brothers frequented at Favor’s. His personal taste ran to a blonde named Bremelia. Did they use her too? Was one of those monsters responsible for the black eyes he saw sometimes on Priscilla?

To be perfectly honest, though, the Hound (and the Mountain?) had always had a handful of more options for sexual release than had he.

One twilit summer evening long ago at Casterly Rock, he’d walked past two scullions pleasuring each other behind a wall in the beeyard. It was a strange place for an assignation, but perhaps no one bothered them there for fear of being stung? He’d listened, rubbing himself to the rhythm of their little pants and giggles as they touched each other, and after the one made the other come with a squeal, the one who had been pleasured sighed and said, “Thanks, lovey. Haven’t ‘ad anything that nice since that filthy Hound cornered me under a batch of blood sausage in the smokery!” And the other one said, “Oh, yes, ‘at one does have the nicest meat.”

He was a Lannister of Casterly Rock and all the whores in Lannisport were at his service and he could have enticed one of those scullions to service him as well, if he’d offered her enough gold dragons, but they gave it away to the bloody Hound for free. Was the Hound really so much handsomer? So much more dashing? Kinder?   

Tyrion Lannister and Sandor Clegane were so different in station, and yet so similar in outlook and habits. They shared a master (Lord Tywin of the Rock). They shared a worldview (it’s lies all the way down). And though they shared a hunting ground, their relative success with their quarry did seem to diverge: the Hound a little more successful, the Imp a little less.

Oddly, later on in life, they’d even had the same wife.

It would be unfair to Sansa to say they “shared” a wife, but she’d once stood with Tyrion at the Sept of Baelor and said the words, same as she would say them to her Hound.

But as it had always been, the high-born beauty could not bring herself to suffer _his_ attentions, shaking in terror and revulsion as she lay naked in their marriage bed that night.

For all he had tried to do right by her, she simply didn’t want to suffer his touch, didn’t want his little body lying between her long white legs, rutting into her. 

She had cried quietly at very idea. 

He was sure she would have cried louder if her dignity (and his) had not been at risk, or if she thought it would make a damn bit of difference to either of their fates.

How could Tywin have demanded such humiliation as proof of his devotion to House Lannister?

And yet how different did his wife Lady Sansa behave in the company of her ugly Hound, even today. He had never seen a married couple of their age who were still so clearly fucking--and fucking quite often, too--if his ability to read people hadn’t faded in his own middle age.

Some feeling had compelled him to observe them at the wedding--was that feeling called _jealousy_?--and there just was something about the way they moved together, always touching. The whole family--11 of them!--were making their way to their seats in the crowded sept when he spotted them and watched their progress to their position of honor. He’d assigned the Starks to the back row of the family pews, an unusual placement considering they were the Lords Paramount of the North, but if you seated any man with Clegane blood in the front row, no one for 15 rows behind him would be to see a thing. And there were seven such men now, one still called Clegane, the rest with the name and birthright Stark. 

One of the sons--hell if he knew which one, and he should, but they were an indistinguishable blur of shoulders and dark hair and jawlines--had done something to warrant a punch to the shoulder on the way into the pew. There was no force behind the father’s fist, it was just a correction--a boundary drawn. 

She was standing right behind him, holding the littlest girl in her arms with the two others at her skirts. She just leaned in and nuzzled his shoulder with her cheek--for as tall as she was she was still positively elfin compared to her husband--and he looked down and there was what must have been a whole conversation composed entirely of looks, as she kept so close to his arm that you couldn’t see light between then.

And then she seemed nudge him, propel his whole huge body forward with just the tiniest tilt of her...chin? Or was it a kiss of her lips? And the father circled back to the son and clapped him on the shoulder.

A few words were spoken between them--an apology? an argument?--and then the son laughed triumphantly and pointed at the father.

The father chuckled, the crow’s feet around his good eye deepening, and then the son melted back into his pack of brothers.

Then they were all lined up together, and Tyrion’s heart clenched and he realized that was probably what a decent family looked like. Had his own family ever had a chance at such a thing? Perhaps things could have been different if he hadn’t killed his own mother on the day of his birth.

The proper protocol was that everyone stand stock still and reflect on the awe and majesty of the Targaryens and the dragons and the realm at large, but the Starks didn’t have that in them. No, the little daughters were parceled out to their brothers, and hoisted up onto shoulders so they could see better, or engaged in very serious whispered conversations that the brothers attended with gravest concern. The sons seemed to be continuously kicking each other for the entirety of the ceremony. And adjacent to the ruckus, bemused but also detached, sat Sansa arm-in-arm with her Hound.

Protocol dictated that because of her superior house, she ought to have been seated in the first position in the pew, closest the altar. But the Hound took that spot, and she was beside him, in the second position. She was on his scarred side, and Tyrion could see that sometimes when the Hound whispered something to his wife, he overcompensated, turning his head at an unreasonable angle, seemingly trying to get his unburnt side closer to her. He wondered why the Hound wouldn’t just switch seats and then he realized that was the point.

His body was positioned between her and the world.

There was no real danger present--quite the contrary--they were esteemed and beloved relatives of the esteemed and beloved royals, and they were surrounded on all sides by the realm’s most loyal and highly trained guards and soldiers.

No harm would come to them here.

And yet, after all these years, the Hound’s instincts still primed him to protect her. If anyone wanted to come for her or those children, they would have to cut through him first.

And even if the father fell, there also stood the sons. Gods.

Yes, by all the gods, the sons were terrifying, too. He’d said that to Sansa later, and she frowned at him and asked, “Is that meant to be a compliment?” It _had_ been meant as a backhanded compliment of sorts, but Tyrion saw instantly that he’d misunderstood her.

She’d never been truly afraid of the Hound, even though she ought have been, and thus she couldn’t conceive that her sons were as much or more of a menace than their father before them.

As much as Sansa and Sandor had bred an astonishing new strain of Northern hunter-killers--and their success was evident to all--she was their mother and saw them only as her boys.

And he supposed therein lay a defining duality of the Hound, and his sons after him. You were either their people or you weren’t.

If you were outside the Hound’s circle of concern, he’d kill you as soon as casually as another man would speak your name and wave at you on the street. He could effortlessly end your life in a thousand ways, he enjoyed wielding that power, and he would never spare another thought for you after he’d washed your blood off his hands--a fascinating, truly singular balance of nonchalance and bloodlust.

And yet all that power existed _not to promote itself, but in service of a handful of beloved faces_.

What was it the Braavosis said? All must die, but first all men must serve? That was the Hound. All he wanted to do with his life, truly, was to bite and bleed on behalf the Starks.

Gods, Tywin Lannister had fucked right up.

The Lion of the Rock had meant to exterminate the Starks, but he’d somehow lost his own family along the way and given the Starks the seeds to renew themselves, creating an even more vigorous strain of Northern warrior. Tywin had been a devoted patron of both Cleganes, trading food and shelter and a little coin for two of the strongest sword arms the realm had ever seen. But his favor had fallen disproportionately and blindly on Gregor’s relentless inhumanity, and he’d lost the younger brother, the one who would turn out to the true survivor.

For that matter, Tywin had thought to dilute and destroy Sansa’s northern beauty but shackling her to House Lannister with a baby or two by his son the demon monkey. And that would be the end of House Stark. But no.

He’d been unable to defile her. Him and Tywin both.

It couldn’t be done, even if it had been done, because there was always a core of goodness in her that could not be reached and could not be sullied. And Tywin had suffered her to live for her claim to Winterfell, so she lived, and along the way she had lost and found her Hound.

_The song said that she had always loved him before she knew why or what it meant, which sounded impossible, but maybe it was true?_

And the she-wolf and the hound had mated, as sure as if they’d been two wild animals. She’d spread her legs and welcomed the Hound’s big cock between them, over and over again. She must have opened up for him so many times in her youth and in her age. She’d let him fuck her while she was pregnant and while she was nursing and when she was mourning and when she was joyful. 

She’d _wanted_ to be mounted by _that_ beast, and she'd bent herself over, of her own free will, to be savaged by a savage with half a face and a black heart too. 

Tyrion wondered, idly, if anyone in his whole life had truly wanted to be with him. Tysha? Shae? Someone whose affections he hadn’t even noticed? 

Sansa Stark and Sandor Clegane were shamelessly sexual with each other to this day, and while it wasn’t the kind of ostentatious explicit sexuality for which the Martells or his sister had once been known, it was there just the same.

After the wedding ceremony of Princess Naerys of House Targaryen to Prince Lysander of House Martell, Sansa Stark, the Lady of Winterfell, had fallen into animated conversation with the now wizened and crippled Ser Davos, the Onion Knight. With his customary disrespect, the Hound hadn’t even been able to bring himself to stand and speak with the old man. Tyrion saw that Clegane was lost in his own deep, presumably dark, thoughts, and so Sansa, there in her finery, stood and chattered and bubbled over, while he sat, in his finery, and brooded.

Their minds were so differently occupied could have been two complete strangers but for the fact that the whole time, he absent-mindedly ran his hand up and down the back--no, the inside--of her thigh, over and over again. 

She was fully clothed. So was he. One barely seemed to notice the other, and yet the intimacy of the touch was shocking.

Anyone who cared to look could see the sexual bond that was the heart of their relationship. She fucked him, and he fucked her, and he had planted his seed inside her, and her belly had swollen again and again and she nurtured _his_ babies inside her--no one else’s--and delivered them alive and now there were 12 people in the world named Stark, and their name would continue on.

And he, he was the only Lannister left, the little Lion, and he would be the last of his kind. 

He thought of the great old Lion again when he saw the Hound with his daughters later that evening at the wedding banquet. Tywin Lannister was not a good man, but he was a great one. He had truly bent the realm to his whim and he was as fearsome and powerful a lord as Westeros had seen since Aegon’s Conquest.

And yet. For all his power, for all his devotion to his family, to his children, _they_ were all dead, and the Starks lived.

When Tyrion walked past one of the window benches in the far corner of the ballroom, he suddenly realized that Tywin’s fatal flaw was his inability to be vulnerable, to love and be loved, to allow anyone to know him and care for him in return, as wretched he was.

Because there sat the vicious Hound, who even in the autumn of his life would have easily painted the walls around him with other men’s blood if called upon to do so, with his little daughters arrayed around him, looking like nothing so much as a sleepy mastiff in a country courtyard. It was as if the dog had caught the attention of three little chicks just growing out of fluff into first feathers. They climbed upon the old dog’s broad back for sport, and then decided to rest there for a bit, and maybe fan out their wings in the sun as they dozed.

Tyrion had made a crack about a warrior turned nursemaid, and Clegane had just taken another drink from his wine cup and tucked one of the daughters a little closer.

Perhaps the presence of the little girls was the reason Tyrion hadn’t even warranted so much as a surly “Fuck off, Lannister”? 

Tyrion realized he’d been hoping for a renewal of their old animus--Clegane’s challenges energized him a little if he was being honest--but it was gone. 

Clegane had nothing to left to prove to anyone. 

Right then, Sandor Clegane wanted nothing to do with _anyone_ was that wasn’t one of his daughters--beauties all, Tyrion saw, and as innocent and naive as their mother had been before her father had lost his head. Clegane existed now to hold those girls and signal to anyone passing by that they were his and they were safe still and they could not and should not be touched and that he wished, truly wished, to die for them or kill for them, whatever it took save them from any and all suffering.

Tyrion had meant to continue pulling the dog’s tail--it was good for a man to continue to take risks throughout his life--but it was the girls who had put him off it. They knew he was their “Uncle Tyrion,” as Sansa always so graciously introduced him, but their Father’s disregard for him told them what to make of Uncle Tyrion.

They wouldn’t brand him “enemy” quite yet, but as he faced off with the old Hound, those little girls all instinctively turned away from him and toward their father, sending a clear, albeit unstudied, signal that _sides had been chosen_.

 _Father doesn’t like you?_  

_Oh._

_Well..._

He felt inexplicably ashamed, and exceptionally grateful when he was accosted by the First Sealord of Braavos to discuss some business of the realm.

He was Tyrion Lannister, Hand to the Queen. He would be remembered for his achievements for a thousand years. He was a very important person, and he could change the course of history.

He wondered if anyone would really miss him when he passed from this earth.

Would any woman anywhere feel that she had lost some part of her heart when he was gone?

He couldn’t say that he could think of anyone, and yet someday, when Sandor Clegane woke up dead, it would all but destroy one particular woman and three little girls. They would mourn him for the rest of their days, never quite complete again without him.

Tyrion wondered how much of what he had could be surrendered in exchange for that kind of love. Could it be had at any price? Probably not.

Maybe it was simply earned, day after day, by worthy men who had a little luck and the affection of the gods, yes, but who also worked tirelessly to serve and protect the ones they loved and do right by them and show them, in whatever meager ways, what they meant to him.


End file.
